By Walker Evans
Published by Thames and Hudson, 1999 – Gift from a private donor –
Location: Studio Sakse – Chiang Mai, Thailand
Essay by Gilles Mora
This book brings together for the first time over 80 stunning images of pre-revolutionary Cuba, the core of Walker Evans’ first great body of work. Perhaps the most important of all American photographers, he is best known for his pictures for ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’ and for the ‘Farm Security Administration’, which conveys an almost miraculous sense of time and place and social climate. His photographs of Havana, taken just a few years earlier, brilliantly accomplish the same thing in a very different context. These pages present us with powerful images of the full range of life in a vibrant, politically turbulent tropical city. They introduce us to prostitutes, labourers, and policemen, to lively street corners, magnificent public buildings, and de-solute slums. All the hallmarks of Evans’ mature style, its gritty directness, immediacy, and feeling for the “common man,” are strikingly in evidence here. Gilles Mora and Evans’ executor John T. Hill selected the pictures from over 400 Evans took in Havana. Mora’s perceptive text shed light on their character and importance as well as on the circumstances of their creation – jacket flap.
